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MojoKid writes "Shigeru Miyamoto, who has had a hand in some of Nintendo's most popular titles, recently offered that he is working hard to turn Nintendo's DS line of handheld gaming machines into tools for schools. The DS already has a nice line of educational software titles that help users learn, and he thinks that this could really be a huge benefit to schools looking for alternative ways to educate students of a new generation. The company has already managed to get them into Japanese elementary schools."

Normally, I laugh off reports like this. But if Miyamoto says he's doing it, I give it a high probability of working. The guy is a damn genius. And seeing he did the impossible and brought old people into gaming with titles like Wii Sports, I think he may even actually pull off an educational game that's worth a damn.

From what I remember of the "old days" dealing with my high school's foray into teaching basic computing... excuse me... BASIC computing.

They planned on getting a full class of 30 or so students instead of the 6 or so that were supported by a TRS-80 model III and an apple II and an Apple II+.

The school got a shipment of 20+ Atari 800's with floppy drives. They sat in a closet for an entire year because the district refused to let the school use them. Why? When they heard "Atari" they thought 2600 VCS and videogames and could not comprehend that Atari also made computers.

This kind of closed-minded thinking will also kill off any idea of using the DS as an educational tool in the school districts.